APNT-125 - Using the D-Link, Zipato and Philio multi-sound sirens in VERA UI7

Using the D-Link, Zipato and Philio multi-sound sirens in VERA UI7

This guide shows how to trigger the different sounds in the D-Link, Zipato, and Philio multi-sound sirens in the VERA Z-Wave Controller using UI7 firmware.

We've got no idea why manufacturers keep releasing devices that don't work how you'd expect them to work in the real world!

Time and time again we see devices that use obscure Z-Wave Command Classes or have functionality implemented in such a way that specific support needs adding to the Z-Wave Controller to allow you to use the device fully.

How many devices do the manufacturers expect to sell if they don't work out-of-the-box in the common Z-Wave controllers?

Technically Z-Wave Plus was supposed to improve on this situation, but so far this does not appear to be the case unfortunately :-(

NOTE: The steps shown below have been tested in VERA Edge using firmware version 1.7.1707 - they may not work in other versions of VERA firmware!

Prerequisites

We assume that you've already successfully Included the siren in your VERA and it is working correctly using the on / off device that is shown on the UI.

Siren in VERA UI7

Siren Sounds

So, how do we trigger the different sounds then?

According to various manuals found on-line for these devices they should support the "Switch Multi Level" Z-Wave Command Class which should allow you to trigger the different sounds simply by treating the device like a "light dimmer".

Sadly this does not seem to be the case!

By reverse engineering the Z-Wave protocol we discovered that the devices support a newer Z-Wave Command Class called "Notification". This is an evolution of the older "Alarm" Command Class and has been slowly making its' way into new devices over the past few months or so.

It's actually a bit of an odd way to implement the multi-sound functionality as rather than supporting a Command Class that you can send a "Set" Command to, the devices react to Notification Command Class "Report" messages that contain different notification "types" and "events".

Technically this makes sense as you could perhaps configure a motion sensor device to send a notification with a "security" type and a "burglary" event and the siren would make a certain noise. Perhaps a smoke sensor would send a different notification and trigger a different sound.

But doing it this way isn't particularly flexible for real-world use where you would typically want to only sound the siren when your security system was "armed" for example - there's not many (if any) sensor devices that allow you to construct that sort of logic " on board".

Fortunately now that we're armed with the knowledge of what the devices are expecting, we can spoof these notification messages by sending raw Z-Wave commands using LUA scripting!

Make a note of the "ID" that VERA has given to the device - this is the Z-Wave ID (also refered to as the "alt id"), shown on the "Settings" tab of the device in the VERA UI.